The Walton family, which controls most of Arkansas, invested in the purchase of the Pulaski County School Board. At a recent meeting, the board voted 3-2 NOT to purchase new science textbooks to replace obsolete ones. The majority said the district could not afford the $1 million cost, even if stretched out over three years.
The School Board for the Pulaski County Special School District voted 4-2 Tuesday against the immediate purchase of new science textbooks to replace books that are more than a decade old and do not match the state’s new science standards or the district’s science curriculum.
A committee of district teachers, school administrators and others had recommended earlier this year that the district purchase new science books for kindergarten-through-12th grades.
Jennifer Beasley, science program administrator for the district, returned to the board Tuesday with that recommendation but at a newly discounted cost of slightly more than $1 million, and with an alternative option that would spread the purchase of the new science books over three years.
In the first year of the three-year plan, classroom sets of textbooks and digital subscriptions to those books would be purchased for high schools at a maximum cost of $409,544.
Textbooks for middle schools would then be purchased for the 2019-20 school year and for the elementary schools in the following year.
“The committee’s rationale for allowing the high schools to be first to adopt books was that all of our high schools have a D on the state report card,” Beasley told the board, “and committee members agreed it is important for students and teachers to have resources aligned to the new standards.”
The high schools will be teaching to the new state science standards for the first time in this coming school year. The elementary schools incorporated the new standards in the previous two years, Beasley said, and the elementary teachers feel they are better prepared to continue with the instructional materials and lessons they’ve developed. Additionally, the elementary schools typically earned A’s and B’s on the state report card.
The Walton members should have asked their patrons to help out.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why would they need new science textbooks? Has the Bible been updated?
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🙂
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You took the words right out of my mouth. Where is the like button .
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Because “money doesn’t matter”. That’s according to ed reform experts.
Buying textbooks is just “throwing money at the problem”, with “the problem” being that public schools still exist, and the Walton heirs would prefer they didn’t.
They don’t invest in public schools. It’s deliberate. At some point voters who value public schools will figure it out. They’ll notice that an ed reform takeover provides absolutely no benefit to children who attend public schools, and often actually harms them.
They’re anti-public school. It’s not subtle.
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““and committee members agreed it is important for students and teachers to have resources aligned to the new standards.”
Someone tell me again that those supposed standards don’t drive curriculum.
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Can’t and won’t, tell ya that the supposed standards DON’T
drive the incorrectulum. As long as Wilson’s take on standards
is ignored, they can rationalize their complicity.
Cut to the chase… You don’t de-bunk deceptions or irrational
positions, by USING deceptions:
(test scores, supposed standards, grad rates…)
You don’t show “accountable” to the people YOU purport to
serve, with collective complacency to the testing complex.
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Exactly!
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Ed reformers in government see themselves as akin to private investors.
They want to encourage charter and private schools to grow and close public schools.
Therefore, as investors, it makes perfect sense to gut public schools and shower attention and investment on charter and private schools, which is exactly what they do.
The children who attend public schools, so 90% of US children currently, are the collateral damage they’re willing to sacrifice to privatize the system. Sometimes public school families figure it out – I think they get it in Wisconsin now- and they push back and sometimes they don’t.
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Chiara,
9-10% of students go to private schools. 6% go to charter schools.
85% go to public schools.
When you cite the 90% figure, you include charters as if they were public schools rather than contractor schools.
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The public employees at the US Department of Education are blatantly pitching ed tech product again:
https://tech.ed.gov/challenge/
Can someone tell me why we have a huge publicly-paid sales force selling these products to schools and governments? Can ed tech companies not pay their own sales force? Why is the public paying them?
The rah rah for ed tech in ed reform is just shameful. Aren’t some of these people supposed to be scholarly researchers or something? Aren’t they embarrassed to be doing this shameless shilling for ed tech?
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yeh, why bother
1950s text books align with 1950s good old white boys running in the WH and cabinet
Cigarettes are safe
Why test for lead in water; president’s not going near Flint Michigan anyway
Carbon emissions? ha!
Ease up on FDA trials
Get back in the coal mines
Fracking good – nuclear bad.
Obama legislation? – repeal repeal repeal
Harvard science Study? damn liberals
In an essay published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, public health economist David Cutler and statistician Francesca Dominici argue that, even when using an “extremely conservative estimate,” Trump’s policies would cause respiratory problems for more than a million people over a decade, many of them children.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/14/17463430/trump-environment-policies-public-health-epa
Next….
Don’t worry – President will pardon John Scopes who was fined for teaching evolution – and he figures that will make the scientists love him.
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Why bother to spend the money. If the new text books are aligned with the NGSS, they will be crap….just like the NGSS. The older books probably have better science information. How about get rid of ALL the books except for the Bible (SMH).
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Using only the dominant-culture’s bible in schools likely coming soon to a school near you: the “old testament as law” faction is growing in strength too.
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Beware the latest attempt by Achieve to profit from disruption being produced by the NGSS. This “non-profit” entrepreneurial group is deep into the process of re-making the K to 12 science curriculum in the very image of Common Core math and ELA. Out with content and in with process skills. A formula for failure that will negatively impact US science education for every state that took the NGSS bait: the typical sky-is-falling mumbo jumbo nonsensical chain of misrepresentations and snake oil bullshit. They are trying desperately to bring back to life the debunked constructivist/discovery methodologies and continue to conflate the way professionally trained scientists do science with the way children learn science.
Here’s the worn out laundry list of reasons that current science instruction needs disruption and reinvention:
– We have to stop teaching science through rote memorization
– We are falling behind other countries on PISA tests
– We have to start teaching students to think like scientists
– We have to show important connections, unifying themes, and cross-cutting concepts
– We have to integrate disciplines like real scientists
– We have to engage students so that they can construct or discover their own knowledge
The Next Generation Science Standards will be a Common Core redux that wastes billions of dollars, millions of teacher hours, and a generation of innocent children fallen victim to all those duped by the entrepreneurs at Achieve, Fool us once shame on them. Fool us twice . . .
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After nearly two decades of test-and-punish, standards-based “reform” we now have mountains of evidence proving just how useless, if not harmful, this approach has been. Despite the abject failures of NCLB, RTTT, and the Duncan Waiver Program, we are now faced with a similar assault-by-standards with the creation of Common Core’s bastard child, the NGSS. These new science standards are the epitome of a bad idea gone worse. Read ‘em and weep:
Kindergarten
Analyze data to determine if a design solution works as intended to change the speed or direction of an object with a push or a pull.
Communicate solutions that will reduce the impact of humans on the land, water, air, and/or other living things in the local environment.
Construct an argument supported by evidence for how plants and animals (including humans) can change the environment to meet their needs.
GRADE 1
Plan and conduct investigations to determine the effect of placing objects made with different materials in the path of a beam of light.
Use materials to design a solution to a human problem by mimicking how plants and/or animals use their external parts to help them survive, grow, and meet their needs.
Read texts and use media to determine patterns in behavior of parents and offspring that help offspring survive.
GRADE 2
Analyze data obtained from testing different materials to determine which materials have the properties that are best suited for an intended purpose.
Make observations to construct an evidence-based account of how an object made of a small set of pieces can be disassembled and made into a new object.
Compare multiple solutions designed to slow or prevent wind or water from changing the shape of the land.*
GRADE 3
Plan and conduct an investigation to provide evidence of the effects of balanced and unbalanced forces on the motion of an object.
Ask questions to determine cause and effect relationships of electric or magnetic interactions between two objects not in contact with each other.
Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence that plants and animals have traits inherited from parents and that variation of these traits exists in a group of similar organisms.
Analyze and interpret data from fossils to provide evidence of the organisms and the environments in which they lived long ago.
Make a claim about the merit of a solution to a problem caused when the environment changes and the types of plants and animals that live there may change.
Make a claim about the merit of a design solution that reduces the impacts of a weather-related.
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If I may make a slight modification to one of your thoughts:
“After nearly two decades of test-and-punish, standards-based “reform” we now have mountains of evidence proving just how useless AND harmful, this approach has been.”
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Beware the Next Generation (K to 12) Science Standards now adopted by 18(?) states, including California and New York
A skills centered, constructivist, dumbed-down approach to biology, chemistry, physics, geology, meteorology, astronomy, and more.
NGSS – Future Fail On its Way!
The roadmap to disaster:
1) Write abstract, confusing, jargon saturated, skills-centric, content weak, K to 12 science standards in your ivory tower.
2) Be sure that elementary standards are developmentally inappropriate by emphasizing abstract skill sets and omitting simple, concrete, straight forward, important content knowledge (facts and ideas)
3) Include the word “engineering” to satisfy the STEM worshippers, but take the generally accepted meaning and twist it into a vague, nebulous, and essentially useless form
4) Provide little training and not nearly enough TIME for teachers to develop substantial science programs. Be sure to include a fleet of clueless consultants to confuse and confound elementary teachers while misrepresenting the fundamental goals of scientific literacy
5) Provide limited funding for science supplies, equipment, and facilities
6) Flood the market with crappy, canned science and engineering activities and projects – and even worse, computer/online programs – all developed by non-teachers.
7) Write and administer abstract, confusing, jargon saturated, skills-centric, content weak, K to 12 science tests based on said standards (in your ivory tower).
NGSS is another Common Core-like disaster in the making; another “implementation” failure just waiting to happen. Like every new idea proposed by outsiders, they can look good on paper (although not so with NGSS) but there will NEVER, ever be sufficient TIME allotted to teachers to make them work with real kids in real classrooms. I see NGSS as a Trojan Horse filled with consultants, code writers, test developers, publishers, privatizers, and corporatists foaming at the mouth at yet another opportunity to pillage and plunder public school resources.
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Huckbee Sanders definitely sees the Bible as precedent for legislation
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The state of Arkansas adopted Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Their texts are out of date and so are the science texts in many states.
The NGSS standards are so complex that even major publishers are having a hard time generating new texts. As usual, tried and true lessons from the past are being recycled. As usual, field trials of new content and materials are limited by the high costs for the publisher and the cost of revisions that may be needed.. According to EdWeek, districts are having a hard time finding textbooks and other instructional materials aligned with the 2013 NGSS.
EdReports, which claims to be a Consumer Reports for education, is a Gates-funded project. Reviewers for EdREports follow criteria that call for strict alignments with the CCSS and related standards grade-by-grade, and with no content from a prior grade reviewed and reintroduced in the next grade. I have not seen any modifications in the method and criteria for reviewing high school science texts, but EdReports ratings of secondary science tests are expected this fall. https://www.edreports.org/about/our-approach/index.html
Reviews of textbooks are time-intensive and if you are looking for NGSS compliance, the reviews are really complicated. Achieve has also gotten into the reviewing act, but only for a few units, not textbooks.
Teachers working independently have also found that getting NCSS-aligned resources together is hard. According to EdWeek, secondary teachers of science want to see texts and resources that introduce a “phenomenon,” then forward exploration and understanding, then build coherently to deeper understanding through more lessons. I wonder if these teacher-reviewers are assuming that students have encountered science instruction compliant with NGSS prior to high school.
Before high school—K-8— science texts are supposed to align with 381 CCSS standards. Of these, 182 are in math, 96 in ELA reading, 82 in ELA writing, and 21 in science/technical subjects Literacy. All of those standards are supposed to be linked with the 146 core content standards in SCIENCE for K-8. So the standards writers have conjured 527 that are supposed to be met for science-specific learning before high school. If all those standards harbor redundancies, good luck in ferreting them out.
The architecture for high school standards rests on earlier understandings and achievements in; (a) the practices of science, (b) the core concepts within the earth, life, and physical sciences plus engineering…and (c) “themes” that cut across disciplines. That structure has been called three-dimensional. Of course, neither the CCSS nor NGSS offer a roadmap from standards to curricula to tests…but there is plenty of hoopla about new and rigorous standards.
In my experience, writers of standards are almost always serving up more content and connections of “this to that” than can be shoved into texts and other coherently planned instructional materials. I think most experienced teachers want to move well beyond the all too prevalent view of education as text-bound, sage on the stage delivery of content relevant to tests. That view is likely to make science free of the wonderments of eyes-on and hands-on experiments, whether in labs or field work.
According to EdWeek, five publishers have entered the market for NGSS science texts and resources since 2016. Although I have not looked at the texts, there is one constant in marketing these texts: The top line is “100% compliance with the NGSS.” For bells and whistles the ads for these texts make claims on behalf of “real world problem solving,” “STEM careers,” “multi-modality,” “research tested,” “instructional shifts” and the NGSS “philosophy of three dimensional learning.”
I have been through several rounds of textbook writing along with the development with ancillary materials. I have reviewed publications for state adoptions. All that was before the era of the CCSS and not in science, but the challenges of meeting expectations for any marketable and profitable product are usually underestimated…especially by writers of standards who really do want one-size-fits-all education, and now with every dimension of instruction described in computer code and “aligned ” with texts and tests.
Anyone who has worked on the publishing side knows that profits drive what publishers can and will deliver. In the best of worlds, teacher-made lessons and experiments would be central. Texts, resources from the library/media room or accessed online would be backup. All in-class studies would be enriched by demos and meet-ups with living breathing scientists and projects students initiate based on their curiosity and interest.
The end-game of standards-based education was and is standardized learning…with computer-based delivery of instruction envisioned from the get-go. Current hoopla about personalized education is mostly hot air. Unless you are speaking of artificial intelligence, learning is always personal. It does not need to be “ized.”
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/06/06/educators-scramble-for-texts-to-match-science.html
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The Walton minions should all be tried for treason and subversion and if found guilty in court, stripped of all their property and wealth.
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AMEN, Lloyd. The Waltons and people like them really want SLAVES to do their bidding.
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